The map below displays county level estimates of the earnings among working attendees of local public two-year colleges ten years after first attendance. The map is interactive: click on any county for county-level estimate. Zoom using “+/-” in upper left corner. Pan using mouse or keyboard arrows. Check “institutions” box to see institutional location. Click on institutions to see scorecard data for that institution.
The data only include attendees who took some form of federal financial aid (loans or grants). County-level estimates are based on the distance-weighted measures for nearby institutions, with nearest institutions weighted highest.
The primary income data come from college scorecard dataset: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/. The variable used is md_earn_wne_p10. Data are from the year 2011.
Median income data come from the American Community Survey 3-year rolling estimates. The table id is S19013. The years surrounding 2011 were used (2010-2012). Data from the table are in the GitHub respository, but the full table can be downloaded here.
Spatial shapefiles were taken from the U.S. Census Bureau Cartographic Boundary Shapefiles. Specifically, the 500k resolution files were used. These contain fewer details than finer featured TIGER shapefiles, but are much smaller and are adequate for this map.
The GitHub repository for this project may be found at https://github.com/wdoyle42/scorecard.
This is an ongoing project. Comments welcome, better code even more so.